Charting Best Practices

6 tips to increase the usability of your charts

As people get busier day by day, charts just doing the job of converting data into easily identifiable patterns and trends just isn't enough anymore. They have to present all information clearly and concisely, prioritize information for understanding them at-a-glance and remove any possibility of ambiguities.

How to create an intuitive drill-down interface?

Drill-down charts are widely used in reports and dashboards. They help maximize business information by presenting the data in digestible chunks. However, in a lot of applications a majority of of users are unable to reap their benefits completely owing to the unintuitive drill-down interface the application has. Haven’t you ever come across a report where you had no idea that the charts could be drilled down into? Or you drilled down multiple levels into the chart only to lose track of where you currently are or where you came from?

Here, we discuss a systematic way to create an intuitive drill-down interface for all your reports and dashboards.

Conceptualizing an effective business dashboard – an outline

Conceptualizing a business dashboard is a complex process. It requires in-depth knowledge of the business processes involved and deep technical knowledge of how to go about implementing it too. But another aspect that is often overlooked is an understanding of how the end user will interact with the dashboard. A poor understanding of that leads to poorly designed dashboards, which hinders decision-making, and kills the very purpose of the dashboard. With this article, we aim to equip you with a basic understanding of how end users interact with a dashboard and more generally, how you can conceptualize your business dashboards better.